~ issues of relevance to Waikanae people

another wet day – so why not go to the movies

At the moment there are two screening at the Shoreline worth seeing, both with Oscar nominations:

Lion tells the story of Saroo, an Indian boy who while waiting in vain for his brother to return to a railway station at Khandwa one night, inadvertently takes a 1600 km trip in a locked out-of service passenger carriage to Calcutta where he encounters all the perils faced by street children. Not knowing where he has come from, eventually authorities in an orphanage put him up for foreign adoption which a middle class couple in Hobart do.

Jump forward 20 years and as an adult Saroo finds himself plagued by memories of his lost family and with Google Earth tries to search for them; eventually he works this out.

It is all based on fact and the real people are shown at the end; Eva says the real Saroo unfortunately isn’t as handsome as the adult actor. It has superb cinematography and unsurprisingly this is one of the Oscar nominations. It takes you to a country with 1.33 billion people of which many have a very impoverished life.

“I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.” — Jack Kerouac

“A city with all the personality of a paper cup.” — Raymond Chandler

Most quotes about Los Angeles involve the words ‘sad’, ‘lonely’, ‘cars’ and ‘plastic’, but the entertainment industry makes it fascinating to many. For us it’s beaches, palm trees, where it doesn’t get too hot or too cold, and where it’s dry most of the time. The movie La La Land makes the point that the four seasons don’t differ much. 🙂

This musical has one of its stars a café barista and wannabe actress, the other a jazz pianist who wants to play his music, not other people’s. They first meet in an unromantic way near the start, which is a traffic jam on the intersection ramp of I-105 to I-110 [see earlier post]; it’s winter, but car tops are down. Probably deliberate irony, this ramp featured in the movie Speed from 1995.

The themes and the settings fit well and the director pulls out all the stops.